Reviews: Modern Junior Monologues by Stephanie Pearce & Jayne Pilling
Naomi Holcombe
Thursday, December 1, 2022
'A useful selection of monologues for young students, with promising but limited guidance that could be expanded upon,' says Naomi Holcombe.
Modern Junior Monologues is a book with over ‘60 stand-alone contemporary monologues’ for young performers between seven and 11. There is a page at the start explaining what a monologue is and the lengths of the chosen texts in the book vary, but none are more than a page. There is a wide range of genres explored, with some that would appeal to the more comic performer as well as more serious options.
Finding contemporary and accessible monologues for young actors can be difficult, so this book would prove useful for drama teachers and practitioners alike. I admit that looking through the monologues I presumed this text was aimed at performers younger than seven as some are very short and very basic, but I appreciate that this book caters for all abilities.
However, the way the text is set out could be much more accessible and give ownership and guidance to the young person beyond that given by the teacher.
A monologue is usually written in one single block of text, but here it would help if they were written out in paragraphs or broken up. This could help make some of the more hard-hitting monologues easier to understand and help the performer break the emotional shifts up into chunks.
Additional space below the monologue would also be helpful to allow the student to write notes to explore what they think the character is feeling or how to alter their body or voice to suit the role. This could prompt them to consider the role for themselves and give them more ownership of the material.
There is a useful section at the back which perhaps answers my suggestions above. The segment is entitled ‘Drama exercises’, with a useful character grid sheet, as well as warm-up and vocal exercises. This section could have been expanded further as it's only a few pages long and is potentially very useful for a young actor.
All in all, this is a useful book, but it's not particularly innovative. It's great to have so many modern monologues in one place, but if the final section had been expanded it could have proved a really useful guide to performance beyond a simple list of texts.
